The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Specifying the Goals of a Defect Taxonomy

It’s important to define the goals of a defect prevention project more clearly so that a taxonomy can be created to highlight defect areas. The more specific goals are as follows:

• Detect defects earlier in the cycle.

• Reduce the introduction of defects.

• Prevent the introduction of defects. (It is better to make something impossible rather than merely unlikely.)

• Improve efficiency as an indirect goal. (If developers are more efficient, they have more time to fix defects and perhaps think more about root causes or other causes of defects. If testers are more efficient, they can write more complete tests and reusable test code.)

Everyone has ideas about how to accomplish these goals. The problem is that the ...